The Cli-Fi Report is a portal for all things cli-fi, a subgenre of speculative fiction, with new links from blogs to videos to Wikipedia to Twitter to news links and Facebook Groups. See the portal, the largest Cli-Fi portal on the Internet at cli-fi.net / MEDIA inquiries at: danbloom@gmail.com

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

As told to Radio Station KCFI....on August 13, 2016 [Transcript in preparation]

TEXT:

Well, I am not talking abou the end of the world but just our small corner of the world, the human species. The Earth will go on without us. Thousands of species will go on with us, both in the ground and in the skies (and in the waters).

So I am not about the end of the Earth and not the extinction of most species, just the end of human civilization and the human species. My time frame is the next 500 to 1000 years. 30 to 60 more generations of man (and woman, of course). And then we won't be here any more. That is where we are heading. Anyone, everyone, knows this. But most people, even die-hard climate activists and academic risk policy communications, they are all in denial. They want fixes, solutions, a Hollywood ending. Sorry, mate, it aint gonna be like that.

THIS IS SUE WANG, 45, doing her job as a deaf news anchor woman/reporter at PTS TV in Taiwan. 30 minute program every morning, and here she is inter-spaced betweem the NEWS segments in CHinese and her signing the same story in her unique style. Soon to be the subject of a news article in the USA and the UK.

......Ghosh’s analysis is intricate and erudite, and for the most part defies easy summary. He builds arguments by bringing together personal stories, folklore, the work of writers, anthropologists, philosophers, scientists, economists, ecologists, historians, and even the pope. ....Climate change might be more effectively communicated through images rather than "our accustomed logocentrism". (And though Ghosh doesn’t say so, there’s a pretty basic failure of logos in those tepid terms we use —‘global warming’ sounds distinctly cosy, and ‘climate change’ calls for a cardigan rather than an effort to avert catastrophe.)

Which is why I found it curious that Ghosh more than once brings up the matter of ‘serious fiction’ and its upturned nose. WTF?

To bring up climate change in a novel, Ghosh writes, “is in fact to court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence; it is to risk banishment to the humbler dwellings that surround the manor house…” WTF?

But why take serious fiction so seriously? After all, its conventions don’t have a monopoly on human imagination. The lines between categories of fiction are blurry at best, and if something called science fiction or climate fiction can better accommodate what is urgent, then maybe we should let it. YES YES YES!

As Caroline Kormann wrote in a 2013 survey of climate-change novels, “Today, novels that would once have been called science fiction can be read as social realism.” That might be even truer of tomorrow.

Is it possible that non-fiction is in some ways better-suited for imaginative writing around the climate crisis? NO NO NO!

Thursday, August 25, 2016

''Green rights are among humanity's most powerful tools for protecting and repairing the natural world.''

Silver Donald Cameron and his wife, the Canadian writer Marjorie Simmins

Canadian environmental activist and journalist Silver Donald Cameron is soon set to embark on a nationwide tour across Canada to promote ''Green Rights.'' Born in Canada in 1937, Cameron is a well-known figure in Canadian environmental circles and has been at it for a while -- his whole life, in fact. Wikipedia tells you even more with a photo, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Donald_Cameron

[For readers of this blog who are not from Canada and might wonder how Cameron got his unusual name, well, it's a great story, and you can read about it here: (http://silverdonaldcameron.ca/any-other-name). "Silver" is his professional nickname. As you can see from the little article about it, his problem at the time -- in the middle of his life -- was that the name "Donald Cameron" was so common in Canada that he something to set him apart as an author and speaker. He was was 36: with white hair, black eyebrows and black moustache. A friend of his said, what about calling yourself "Silver Donald Cameron!" It was a perfect solution, and now you know the backstory. ]

The cross-country tour starts in Nova Scotia in late September and then moves on to Ottowa and points West until early November. Along the way, there will be press conferences and TV interviews, film screenings and lectures.

The tour starts in Nova Scotia in late September, and then Ottawa and west from Oct 1 - Nov 4 or thereabouts, Cameron told us.

Green Rights? In a recent email inteview with Cameron, he told us a few things we didn't know:

''Of the 193 nations in the U.N., 180 recognize their citizens' legal right to a healthy environment. Some recognize the rights of Nature herself -- Ecuador included those rights in its constitution. Canada and the USA are among the 13 nations that don't recognize them at all. There's a significant movement to do so in both countries, and my upcoming national tour is designed to increase the momentum in Canada," he told us.

When asked when Canada might adopt the Green Rights into law there, he said: ''I would like to see environmental rights adopted in Canada within the life of the current government, during the administration of Justin Trudeau, i.e. by 2020. I think that's possible. "

The tour will cross Canada from east to west, Cameron noted, adding: "We'll do screenings and other events on the [Canadian] West Coast over the winter, with details to be announced later. I'd love to do a similar tour in the USA next year in 2017, but we'd need a USA organizing partner and we don't currently have one."

Some films to watch: A shorter parallel film (''Defenders of the Dawn,'' 45 minutes) has been shown by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, in Cameron's region of Canada only so far. That film can be streamed at www.TheGreenInterview.com; just take a one-month free trial subscription and off you go.

''The full 90-minute GreenRights film will also stream at TheGreenInterview.com starting in September 2016. We'd love to broadcast it nationwide, worldwide even, but haven't had time to explore that yet. The companion book, ''Warrior Lawyers,'' will be available at www.SilverDonaldCameron.ca and on Amazon, starting after Labour Day in Canada," he said.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

GREEN RIGHTS

The right to breathe. The right to clean water. The right to wholesome food.

Air, water, food – these are the sources of life. Without them, we die. And in most nations – more than 180 nations, in fact – citizens are legally entitled to these essential elements of life.

But not in Canada or the United States. And that's what the GreenRights multi-media project is all about: extending our understanding of environmental rights – green rights – and also showing the dramatic impact of those rights in other countries. Because green rights are among our most powerful tools for protecting and repairing the natural world.

Exercising those rights, dedicated citizens and brilliant lawyers are cleaning the beaches of Manila Bay and the air of Amsterdam. They're restoring the Riachuelo River in Buenos Aires, the Ganges in India. They're holding oil companies to account in Brazil and Ecuador. And in the US and Canada, they're fighting to secure these rights for all of us.

These are great human stories – stories of passion and courage, David and Goliath stories, stories of parents and grandparents battling on behalf generations not yet born.

Here's how the GreenRights project will tell their stories.

Green Rights:Your Right to a Healthy World is a feature-length documentary film currently in production. We've finished principal photography and intend to complete the film by summer. For more details, click here. You can view the trailer here.

Defenders of the Dawn: Green Rights in the Maritimes is a one-hour television special broadcast on September 5, 2015 on the Atlantic network of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It can be live-streamed here.Defenders of the Dawn has its own trailer, which can be viewed here.

TheGreenInterview.com now includes about 20 extended individual interviews with key figures – lawyers, activists, scholars and engaged citizens – involved with green rights. These passionate change-makers come from every continent except Antarctica. Each interview includes a brief biography, and the interviews appear in video, audio and text versions. For a list of these Green Interviews, with onward links to the complete interviews, click here.

GreenRights is a project of The Green Interview, a subscription web site presenting feature-length interviews with the world's greatest environmental thinkers and activists. Click here to read how GreenRights evolved from The Green Interview, and click here to visit the Green Interview site.

We are proud that the Sierra Club Canada Foundation has entered into a partnership with us. In 2013, it established the "GreenRights Program" as a project of the Foundation to assist in the development of the feature-length GreenRights documentary.

THE GREEN RIGHTS TRANSCONTINENTAL READING
AND SCREENING TOUR
A Film, A Book, A Journey
The Green Rights Multi-Media Project

The right to breathe. The right to clean water. The right to wholesome food.
Air, water, food – these are the sources of life. Without them, we die. And in most nations – more
than 180 nations, in fact – citizens are legally entitled to these essential elements of life.

But not in Canada or the United States. And that's what the Green Rights multi-media project is all
about: the human right to a healthy environment, and Mother Nature's right to be respected and
protected.

The citizenship of North Americans is hobbled because we don't have these green rights.

Canadians and Americans literally don't know what they're missing. So we're telling the dramatic
stories of how citizens use those rights in other countries – and are fighting for them here.

Green
rights are among humanity's most powerful tools for protecting and repairing the natural world.
The overall Green Rights project (www.GreenRights.com) includes films at three lengths – 10 minutes,
45 minutes, 90 minutes – plus extended online interviews between Silver Donald Cameron and 15-20
major figures in the international environmental rights movement.

It also includes Cameron's new
book, Warrior Lawyers: From Manila to Manhattan, Attorneys for the Earth, now in the press.
The Films
The Green Rights films vividly portray remarkable legal battles in nations around the world: dramas in
the courts and on the land.

In Argentina, the Netherlands, Ecuador, the Philippines and elsewhere,
devoted citizens and courageous lawyers take on national governments and international corporations
– and win. The films, narrated by Silver Donald Cameron, also tell stories of Canadian and American
citizens, activists and Natives who are fighting vigorously for the recognition of those rights.

Climate change fiction, or ‘cli-fi’, is an
emerging genre but climate change is not yet
a mainstream topic in popular culture.

If you
had to name a film which addresses climate
change, you might think of The Day After
Tomorrow. The film depicts the world being
plunged into a new ice age as meltwater
caused by global warming halts the North
Atlantic ocean circulation, preventing the
transport of warm surface waters to higher
latitudes. While there is a scientific basis for
these events to occur, the short timescales
portrayed in the media often require some
artistic licence. Another example might
be Waterworld, where melting of the polar
regions results in global flooding and the
loss of almost all land on the planet — an
extreme example of sea level rise.
While there are documentaries addressing
these issues — such as Chasing Ice, with timedelay
footage of glaciers in flux, and Al Gore’s
An Inconvenient Truth — these may be less
engaging to the general population than a
Hollywood blockbuster. Recent news could
be straight from a movie script — thawing
permafrost has released a deadly infection.
This is the news from Siberia, where an
unusually warm summer in a western region
has caused the permafrost to thaw, releasing
anthrax spores. Anthrax was last seen in the
region 75 years ago, but it can survive being
frozen: the cause of the current outbreak is
thought to be a defrosted reindeer carcass
or a local burial ground, as shallow burials
are traditional in the region. The outbreak
has resulted in the confirmed death of a
12-year-old boy, 115 hospitalizations and
over 2,300 reindeer deaths1
. The reindeer
remains are being incinerated to destroy
the pathogen and prevent further spread.
This is unlikely to be an isolated incident
as permafrost is warming globally, with
increases in northern Russia of 1–2 °C over
the past 30 to 35 years (with the coldest sites
experiencing increases of 0.4–0.6 °C per
decade at 10 metre depth2
). Thawing of these
and other frozen regions could also unearth
viruses and other pathogens. One virus was
recovered, still infectious, from 30,000 year
old ice3
, hinting at the diversity that may be
frozen away. Another dramatic possibility
is the return of smallpox4
, with remnants
of the virus discovered on an unearthed
mummy5
. It can survive being frozen, but
no live virus has yet been found in historical
victims. Although the risk to human health
is likely to be small from such discoveries
and disinterments, little artistic licence
would be needed to create a disaster tale,
as demonstrated in the TV series Fortitude
where a thawing mammoth leads to death
and upheaval in a remote Arctic settlement.
In another example of what could emerge
from the melting ice, a study has been
published regarding an abandoned cold
war base beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet6
.
Camp Century was a US military base built
within the ice sheet in northwest Greenland
that was abandoned in 1967. Little effort was
made to decommission and remove waste
when it was deserted as its location within
the ice sheet was expected to lock it away
for eternity. Now, using business-as-usual
scenarios, the authors predict that the base
may be uncovered in the next 75 years,
leading to remobilization of liquid waste left
behind and potential political ramifications
of dealing with these issues.
While cli-fi might be playing catch up
with other genres, climate change does
have some high-profile advocates from
popular culture. Leonardo DiCaprio, in his
acceptance speech for his first Oscar, spoke
of climate change and his direct experience
of it while filming The Revenant — the role
that lead to his best actor award. While he
has spoken on environment issues in the
past, this was an event with global coverage
garnering a broader reach. Recent research7
looks at the impact of DiCaprio’s acceptance
speech on the media coverage, tweets and
Google searches of ‘climate change’ or
‘global warming’. While traditional media
studied showed little change, there were
over 250,000 related tweets that day — a
636% increase on expectations. Furthermore,
web searches increased 261%, and remained
elevated for 4 days. This level of engagement
was around four times greater than that seen
in the daily averages during the Conference
of the Parties Paris meeting in late 2015, or
on Earth Day in April 2015.
On an even bigger stage, climate change
was featured in the opening ceremony of the
Rio Olympics — with an estimated audience
of three billion people. The presentation
highlighted the links between global
atmospheric carbon dioxide and increasing
planetary temperature, presented using
the recent viral spiral8
, and the subsequent
melting of polar regions and associated
sea-level rise.
The effect of having such high profile
commentary on the issue is positive, as it
delivers the message to an audience that may
not engage with climate change otherwise.
Such engagement is vital: increased awareness
is essential if societal change is to occur.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

''We've reached the point where even climate fiction novels -- "cli-fi" -- can't even touch the truths that now surround us, that for all our hope and optimism that somehow we'll muddle through the global warming impact events headed our way and come up with the necessary technological fixes needed to keep the human species thriving for the foreseeable future, say, the next million years.

So what's the point of cli-fi? Point is, there's no longer any point. We're way beyond clifi now, past literary boundaries.

The truths that await the next 30 generations of humans cannot be identified yet but we can get an inkling of what lies ahead. Its' not a pretty picture. It's not dreams of sustainability, it's not green dreams of clean rivers and unpolluted oceans.

Sorry to be so doomy gloomy but we're headed to places unheard of in human history. Cannabalism -- as agriculture and fishing fail.

Mass suicides worldwide as the stench of rotting corpses goes sky high. Mass die-offs as the air becomes unbrethable and water becomes undrinkable. So what did I say at the beginning of this piece?

We've reached the point where even climate fiction novels -- "cli-fi" -- can't even touch the truths that now surround us, that for all our hope and optimism that somehow we'll muddle through the global warming impact events headed our way and come up with the necessary technological fixes needed to keep the human species thriving for the foreseeable future, say, the next million years.''

See ''The Cli-Fi Report'' for more details and linkscli-fi.net============================FIRST POST: AUGUST 25, 2016How can fiction help us think about climate change? Phd Candidate Sarah Dimickreviews a book by Adam Trexler titled ''ANTHROPOCENEFICTIONS'' about the emerging genre of "cli-fi":https://t.co/MdcgLJ4CWy

Review: Adam Trexler’s Anthropocene Fictions

In September of 2005, Senator James Inhofe, who has referred to anthropogenic global warming as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” made Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear required reading for the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. In Crichton’s novel, an ecoterrorist organization blows up an iceberg, induces a flash flood, and generates a tsunami in order to convince the public that global warming is real. When Crichton appeared to testify before the committee, Senator Barbara Boxer insisted that “we have to focus on facts, not fiction.”
But the distinction between fact and fiction is sometimes difficult to maintain. In October of 2012, the writer Nathaniel Rich was proofreading Odds Against Tomorrow, his novel featuring a disastrous flood in New York City, when Superstorm Sandy hit the east coast. “I had the very strange experience of editing the final proof of my novel one night, going to sleep, and waking up and essentially seeing it adapted on cable television the next morning,” Rich said. “It was eerie. But I think this is the time we live in now.”
Both of these stories raise questions about the powers and capacities of fiction during an era of climate change. What does fiction have the ability to illuminate and what doesn’t it? As the climate shifts, what types of stories feel increasingly resonant? What alternative futures have been imagined within the emerging genre of “cli-fi”? And in the midst of all these speculative futures, how can the present be brought into focus and clarified?

Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change

To grapple with these questions, Adam Trexler compiled a working bibliography of over 150 novels “about climate change, in one sense or another” (7). He tracked down works suggested by friends-of-friends, sifted through book reviews in newspapers, and conducted a lengthy archival search of booksellers’ trade publications. Trexler’s bibliography ranges from midcentury novels about nuclear winter and terraforming to futuristic science fiction like Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. It encompasses young adult fiction, like Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries, as well as high-brow literary works, like Ian McEwan’s Solar. The resulting analysis, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change, is the most comprehensive study yet conducted of cli-fi’s challenges, tendencies, and possibilities.
Trexler argues that in an era characterized by global warming skepticism, “the novel maintains a problematic relationship with the truth of climate change” (29). Timescales are condensed to increase narrative drama, and scenarios are intensified to amplify the force of a jeremiad. As a form, the novel is simply not designed to mirror scientific realism. And yet, to fictionalize climate change is “not about falsifying it, or making it imaginary, but rather about using narrative to heighten its reality” (75). In fact, many authors carefully embed scientific facts in their texts, weaving carbon dioxide levels, temperature readings, and extinction rates into their characters’ dialogues. As Ovid Brown, a lepidopterist in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, explains to a rural farming community in Tennessee how the climate has altered monarch migrations, Kingsolver depicts the complex circuits of climatic knowledge, tracing the ways in which our political identities and economic circumstances repress or attract scientific ideas. Novels might be best understood not as mirrors of laboratory data but as portraits of the anxieties and hopes enmeshed in scientific findings.
If truth is a challenge, so is location. As a global phenomenon, climate change cannot be fully portrayed in a single setting. Therefore, authors eager to provide their characters with tangible experiences of climate change employ a handful of scenarios: extreme heat, catastrophic floods, and polar calamities. These three hallmarks of climate fiction come with their own limitations. Chronic heat often fails to generate a convincing narrative crisis. Flood stories are as ancient as literature itself and “neither the terror nor the telling is changed by a footnote to increased global temperature” (80). Polar narratives tend to depict global warming as a remote threat, unconnected to urban centers and more populated areas of the globe. Additionally, Trexler observes that many of these scenarios also involve a chronological regression, the world imagined after a storm or flood often eerily resembling the world of the 18th or 19th century. It is difficult to imagine the future as anything other than the past.
Despite these challenges, cli-fi novels can serve as “experimental investigations of social structures responding to climate change” (122). They can model alternative political configurations and climate policies, imagining the futures that particular distributions of power may produce. Trexler divides political climate change novels into three primary categories: conflicts between two states, clashes between radical environmentalist groups and the capitalist establishment, and thrillers featuring a rogue team of expert bureaucrats or scientists that eventually saves the world. It is worth noting the thread of environmental authoritarianism running through some of these novels, celebrating scientists and politicians “more concerned with shaping the public than bringing it into democratic processes” (169). In Trexler’s estimation, books relying on threats of annihilation or single-handed heroism are less politically inventive then those imagining fresh alliances.

Books from the library of the Oak Grove Luthern School are rescued from a flood of the Red River in April 2009. Photo by Patsy Lynch/FEMA.

While cli-fi from the 20th century is preoccupied with forecasting the future, novels in the 21st century have become increasingly focused on the present, “sensitizing the reader to what is before us, rather than demanding we turn away in revulsion or ‘solution’” (170). These novels, which Trexler terms “eco-nomic,” examine contemporary domesticity and political ecology: our air conditioning, shopping habits, and food systems. They weave species loss through stories of human romance or place rising seas in a coming-of-age tale. In these novels, it becomes possible to see how cli-fi is beginning to merge into realist fiction. “The rise of realist fiction about the Anthropocene,” Trexler argues, “shows a wider transformation of human culture….a profound shift in the understanding of climate change itself, from something that ought not to exist to something that already does” (233).
Although Trexler conflates the Anthropocene with climate change—paying minimal attention to fictional representations of nuclear fallout, increased mining and construction, and the rapid spread of species in a period of international travel—this is a timely and necessary study. Anthropocene Fictions brilliantly interjects questions of literary form into discussions of global warming, reminding us of the novel’s unique “capacity to interrogate the emotional, aesthetic, and living experience” of life in a changing climate (6). Novels allow us to gauge the changing climate not through parts per million or rising temperatures but instead through an aesthetic reckoning of what feels real and what feels imagined, what feels feasible and what feels foregone. As the corpus of climate change fiction continues to expand, Trexler’s anatomization will serve as a useful outline of the early inclinations and potentials of this genre.Featured image: Globes displayed at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, 2012. Photo by Girish Kulkarni and Nishita Desai. Sarah Dimick is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interests span contemporary American and global literature, concentrating on environmental writing of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her research explores representations of climate change and the Anthropocene. Contact.